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A pair of bills introduced in the U.S. Senate would grant the White House sweeping new powers to access private online data, regulate the cybersecurity industry and even shut down Internet traffic during a declared "cyber emergency."

Senate bills No. 773 and 778, introduced by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., are both part of what's being called the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, which would create a new Office of the National Cybersecurity Advisor, reportable directly to the president and charged with defending the country from cyber attack.

A working draft of the legislation obtained by an Internet privacy group also spells out plans to grant the Secretary of Commerce access to all privately owned information networks deemed to be critical to the nation's infrastructure "without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule or policy restricting such access."

Who might be watching you without you knowing it? Get "Spychips" and see how major corporations and government are planning to track your every move!

Privacy advocates and Internet experts have been quick to sound the alarm over the act's broadly drawn government powers.

"The cybersecurity threat is real," says Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, which obtained the draft of S.773, "but such a drastic federal intervention in private communications technology and networks could harm both security and privacy."

"The whole thing smells bad to me," writes Larry Seltzer in eWeek, an Internet and print news source on technology issues. "I don't like the chances of the government improving this situation by taking it over generally, and I definitely don't like the idea of politicizing this authority by putting it in the direct control of the president."

This is a copy of the letter that I've already FAX'ed to both of my State Senators:

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Totally AGAINST S. 773 &amp; S. 778 (Cyber-Security Act of 2009)

These two bills would give COMPLETE control of Internet availability to the government – and pave the way for yet another TAX to help fund it – an “Internet” tax.

The text for these two bills isn’t available on Thomas yet, but numerous cyber-security and privacy experts are already worried about their scope.

I urge you to vehemently oppose this legislation – the Internet is about all we have left to both express our views and find out what’s going on behind-the-scenes.

It is the last place that you should ever give the government un-limited power to turn “on’ and ‘off’ !

If you truly want to do something to increase our “cyber-security”, you can do whatever you can to STOP the deployment of “SmartGrid” until ALL THE SECURITY HOLES ARE PATCHED!

Why is this "not good" for gun-owners? Where do you get the majority of your news and alerts about gun issues?

If the SHTF and people do revolt - do you want the government to be able to shut down the Internet, so that they can cover up everything they do - and minimize the extent of any such revolt? Isolate us from each other at the time we'd need each other the most?

I strongly suggest you don't waste any time contacting your Reps about THIS one. Pete

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The US controls the internet still afaik.

If the internet is shut down, people won't be able to look at their p0rn, and many businesses will fail. You can bet the people who provide applications by a service via the Internet will sue the government.

Can the government even be granted such control? Does this fall under interstate commerce and/or foreign commerce? One could argue states could stand up and say "no" to a complete shutdown inside of their state.

Gays are prominent members of firearm rights, we do more via the courts, don't like it? Leave.

Religious bigots against same sex marriage are not different than white supremacists.

I expel anti-gay people off my teams. Tolerance is key to team cohesion and team building.

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Yeah, they can certainly try. The internet is not something that can be controlled. The way it it works encourages bypassing any sort of restrictions. Just look at China, if any government could effectively censor the internet it would be that one, and the Chinese citizens who really want to get around the blocks are successful.

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FogRider wrote:

Yeah, they can certainly try. The internet is not something that can be controlled. The way it it works encourages bypassing any sort of restrictions. Just look at China, if any government could effectively censor the internet it would be that one, and the Chinese citizens who really want to get around the blocks are successful.

only because its unregulated in other places. if the US starts to control it, it'll be much much harder for them

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And when those get taken out, do you think the geeks and hackers are just going to sit there and say "well, it was fun while it lasted"? No, you will have new rigs set up all over the place. Maybe not as efficient, but still functional. Instead of six big DNS servers you'll have thousands all over the place. Look, I'm not saying that the government can't cripple the system. But to think that they can take it down completely, or even most of the way is just not right. To many people have an interest in keeping it running, and the ability to do so.

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FogRider wrote:

And when those get taken out, do you think the geeks and hackers are just going to sit there and say "well, it was fun while it lasted"? No, you will have new rigs set up all over the place. Maybe not as efficient, but still functional. Instead of six big DNS servers you'll have thousands all over the place. Look, I'm not saying that the government can't cripple the system. But to think that they can take it down completely, or even most of the way is just not right. To many people have an interest in keeping it running, and the ability to do so.

you are right, and what it will do it create yet another group of criminals that never should've been

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FogRider wrote:

And when those get taken out, do you think the geeks and hackers are just going to sit there and say "well, it was fun while it lasted"? No, you will have new rigs set up all over the place. Maybe not as efficient, but still functional. Instead of six big DNS servers you'll have thousands all over the place. Look, I'm not saying that the government can't cripple the system. But to think that they can take it down completely, or even most of the way is just not right. To many people have an interest in keeping it running, and the ability to do so.

The design of the 'Net was that it could still function even with substantial failure of several parts. I just wish they had gone with a more web centric view rather than tree view. Break a branch off the tree and everyone downstream is hosed. Under a web setup, a strand breaks and you simply re-route automatically along another path.

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The complete and utter truth can be challenged from every direction and it will always hold up. Accordingly there are few greater displays of illegitimacy than to attempt to impede free thought and communication.

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Hackers would find a work-around for us, private servers would come online quickly, information will continue to flow. I have far more faith in the technical abilities of my friendly neighborhood geek than I do in that of the federales.

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Eww... Well there was an outage somewhere in mid-east I believe where one of the control servers went haywire and started to poison routes. I think if anyone really wanted to temporarily interrupt the net could do so if they've access to the root servers, very unlikely though.

Gays are prominent members of firearm rights, we do more via the courts, don't like it? Leave.

Religious bigots against same sex marriage are not different than white supremacists.

I expel anti-gay people off my teams. Tolerance is key to team cohesion and team building.

The internet, and indeed DNS itself, will not cease to function if all six of those servers were taken offline. It would be much harder than that. For starters, most serious hacking is done or at least doable using IPs, no domain name resolution necessary. You're talking about making Amazon fail to resolve; we're talking about the integrity of the internet itself.

In fact, due to DNS caching, all 6 of those servers could be physically destroyed simultaneously and most peoples' DNS queries would resolve fine for days to come.